Emma Goldman Quotes

My second-grade teacher went around the class and asked everybody what they were going to be when they grew up. I said, 'I want to travel the world,' and he said, 'You'll be married and pregnant by 21, just like all the girls in this room.'

Marriage is the only chance (and it is but a chance) offered to women for escape from this death and how eagerly and how ignorantly it is embraced.

It is always incomprehensible to a man that a woman should ever refuse an offer of marriage.

But, alas! what poor Woman is ever taught that she should have a higher Design than to get her a Husband?

Western women have been controlled by ideals and stereotypes as much as by material constraints.

A woman dictates before marriage in order that she may have an appetite for submission afterwards.

The message about sex and relationships that she had gotten as a child... was confused, contradictory. Sex was for men, and marriage, like lifeboats, was for women and children.

Since a woman must wear chains, I would have the pleasure of hearing 'em rattle a little.

It is a woman's business to get married as soon as possible, and a man's to keep unmarried as long as he can.

I never felt I could give up my life of freedom to become a man's housekeeper. When I was young, if a girl married poverty, she became a drudge; if she married wealth, she became a doll. Had I married at twenty-one, I would have been either a drudge or a doll for fifty-five years. Think of it!

When you raise girls, you're raising children for strangers.

I wish someone would have told me that, just because I'm a girl, I don't have to get married.

Many women do not recognize themselves as discriminated against; no better proof could be found of the totality of their conditioning.

Often, women as little girls are sent off on a track for them to live a perfect life and be a perfect woman. Not for boys, who can be themselves with their mood and their temper.

'Single' is usually applied to women as though they are a problem to be fixed.

The sum and substance of female education in America, as in England, is training women to consider marriage as the sole object in life, and to pretend that they do not think so.

To be born woman is to know - although they do not speak of it at school - women must labor to be beautiful.

Society certainly encourages women to be victims in every way.

Show me a woman who doesn't feel guilty and I'll show you a man.

I was in fact pretty much - by the larger culture, by the local culture, by people around me, by people on TV - encouraged to imagine women as something slightly inferior to men.

I was not supposed to be in any way a liberated person. I was a female born in the '40s in a patriarchal family; I was supposed to marry and make everyone around me happy.

Most women are not programmed to prefer a great career to a great man and a family. They feel they were sold a bill of goods at college and by the media.

There is something revolting about the way girls' minds often jump to marriage long before they jump to love. And most of those minds are shut to what marriage really means.

For most of my life I let women do the driving and was happy to let them.

When I went to college, as much as my parents emphasized academic achievement, they emphasized marriage even more. They told me that the most eligible women marry young to get a 'good man' before they are all taken.